


Sounds

by ren (renegadewriter)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, John has nightmares, PTSD, Sherlock Cares, violin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 17:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegadewriter/pseuds/ren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John had PTSD, it wasn't a problem. Until the nightmares began. Sherlock strives to find a way to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sounds

**Author's Note:**

> First Sherlock fic. Frankly I'm surprised it took me this long, been following this show since it first came out. Hope you all like it =)

Screams and blood. 

Those were the things that came to John's mind every time he closed his eyes. Ever since he returned from Afghanistan his dreams had be plagued by the sounds of the battlefield. PTSD they called it. Although, Mycrofft seemed convinced he missed the savagery that came with war. Maybe, in way, he did. 

In the war he was always doing something, helping people, saving lives and doing the best he could in every situation. He missed that. The thrill, and the challenge. Although, he would never wish people to suffer and be in pain just so he could get his kicks. He hated suffering, but found pleasure in being able to quell it. 

Still, now that he was back, his mind was able to settle. He processed what he had done, lives he hand't been able to save, quickly pushed aside for someone still alive. There were always dead bodies, but also live ones that required his immediate attention. There was no other option but to completely erase the dead men from his mind.  

Now, in his dreams, he remembered them. Their faces, their wounds, their names. It haunted him. Even if he had made his peace with the fact that people did in fact die, specially in wars, and that he wouldn't be able to save everyone, there was still that sense that he might have been able to save more, maybe only one more if he had been better. Arrived earlier, had quality materials, a proper staff, hell proper medical facilities. In the middle of a battlefield though, that had always been impossible. 

That wasn't what was killing him though. 

He had to kill people at war. Kill or be killed. Men rarely understand what they will have to do when they sign up for the army. Kill people to protect others yes. But knowing and doing it were so different. Once you took someone's life, you were never the same. People dealt with it in different ways. Some grew cold to the meaning of life and fired shot after shot only seeing targets, not people. Others would kill and cry at night, some would tear their hands in the gym punching sandbags to let out the stress, others had hobbies, collected things, or simply repressed any and all emotion. John… worked. He took to his medical studies with a fervor that preoccupied his fellow medics. He fought harder to save double the lives of those he had killed, trying to put some balance in the world. He was alive in his job, in what he achieved. The people he helped kept him alive, focused and anchored to reality. 

But at the same time, he grew cold toward the living. Afraid that the next person's blood on his hands as he strove to save them would be someone he cared about. 

To avoid that, he pushed everyone away. 

Sherlock and Mycrofft were right in that sense. His therapist _was_ an idiot.

Trust issues she had said, and she was wrong. It wasn't trust issues, it was simply a matter of not _wanting_ to trust people, not wanting to let them in for fear of having to see them die under his hands.

In reality, John trusted far too easily. 

Why else would he not find the idea of a flatmate alarming? Loneliness? As if.

Why else would he offer his phone to a complete stranger? Kindness? Not really. 

Why else would he go to meet said complete stranger and then decide that yes, sharing a flat was a good idea? Conformity? Never. 

Why else, when asked to come to a crime scene did he follow so quickly? Curiosity? No. 

Why else… would he stay with someone like Sherlock, bound to hurt him with his tactlessness and reckless exploits? 

Because John had trusted Sherlock from the moment they met. 

Which is why, he imagined, was the reason he didn't mind when both Sherlock and Mycrofft casually mentioned his PTSD every single time. It was their way of saying we don't care thay you're damaged. 

John didn't care that they knew.  

Until his dreams started becoming a problem. 

They weren’t about him being killed or the horrors he had seen but rather, the inability to do _more_. He’d dream he got too late to a patient only to see the light go out in his eyes. He dreamt of a group of young men barely in their twenties who he had cared for only to see them dead the next day. He'd dream of being held hostage with others, watching as they were tortured. Sometimes for infomation they didn't have, other times just for sport. And every time, he was incapable of helping them, incapable of protecting them. He dreamt of a battlefield full of dead bodies, him in the middle of a red sea of death and every soldier looking at him with the same accusation in their eyes.   

You _failed_.

John hadn’t cared about his PTSD. Not really. 

Until his dreams started becoming a problem.

Until he woke screaming, his gun, safety off in his hand pointing at the door. 

Until he almost shot Sherlock with it. 

 

 

**0000000000**

 

Sherlock didn't know what to do. He had spent countless nights trying to figure out the solution to his current problem. It wasn’t a case, but a person.

John was having nightmares. Any other person, and they would have been the object of scorn and ridicule on Sherlock's behalf. Not John. Never John. 

The doctor had earned his trust and even more important of all, his respect. He remembered how he had asked the doctor about what his last lines would be if he were about to die.

_"Please God let me live."_

_"Oh use your imagination!"_

_"I don't have to."_

At the time, Sherlock’s mind just went _'Point'_ at that statement. Now, with John’s friendship being held as a precious treasure, he went back to those words and wondered… how many times did John almost die? How many times was he hurt? How close had the doctor come to never being part of his life? 

He could imagine the horrors of the war. A kind soul like John… it amazed Sherlock that he hadn't gone insane. 

But he still could. 

It had started a few weeks after John moved in. Sherlock was in the kitchen going over an experiment when he heard a low moan. At first he ignored it, thinking John was using his laptop for some entertainment. Until a quick glance at their shared desk crossed out that theory. John's laptop was sitting innocently on it.  

He had listened more carefully, now picking up distress and even fear in his tone. Carefully, he had walked toward John's room only to stop as a gasp came from inside, light flooding the floor underneath the door. 

John was awake. 

John'd had a nightmare. 

When in the morning the doctor stared at his medical school mug and absently rubbed his shoulder where the bullet wound was it was easy for Sherlock to guess what the nightmare had been about. 

He didn't bring it up.

 

**00000000**

 

A few days later the same thing happened. 

And the next day. 

And the week after that. 

John constantly had bags under his eyes, got rather grumpy at times and wouldn't play along with Sherlock's games. It was frustrating, and dare he admit it even to himself.. worrying. 

For weeks Sherlock spent reading up on the war in Afghanistan during John's service. He tracked down PTSD theses to have a better understanding on the subject. He even went through Mycrofft's notes about the doctor, frowning at his comment on how John 'missed the battlefield'. Mycrofft was in error. John didn't miss the battlefield per-say, he missed being useful in the way an army doctor is vital to every soldier around him. He missed being in action, doing something that required concentration and a calm mind. He'd had a psychosomatic limp principally because he couldn't cope with being sent back to London, a place full of civilians to do civilian things with an extremely low pension and no job. His injury had made his presence moot and useless. _That_ , had been the real trauma. 

Sherlock deduced that the nightmares hadn't been present for the first weeks of his stay because John had found a new purpose, to help Sherlock with his investigation. He was helping people by doing so, becoming part of something big, returning to being useful and important and vital… until there wasn't a case. 

Sherlock had complained and shouted and thrown a tantrum about the lazy criminal elements because he was bored. Only now did he realize that inactivity for John was akin to being put back in a box in the attic until there came a time where he might be useful again. 

The consultant detective strove to find cases with more frequency than usual, even going as far as taking meaningless ones. Sometimes taking longer to solve just to keep John occupied. Mycrofft had picked up on this, and in an extremely rare act of selflessness Sherlock had told his brother why, and asked to send him cases if he found them. 

The elder Holmes had been surprised by this turn of events and had felt something inside him… _ease_. He never lied when he said that he cared and worried about Sherlock. John was making him more human than ever. The doctor was making a friend out of Sherlock, and even, out of Mycrofft. 

He would do what he could to help John.

 

 

**0000000000**

 

The nightmares continued and Sherlock was getting frantic. Cases alone wouldn't solve the problem. He need something else, something to calm John down when he was having a nightmare. 

He ventured to try and wake him up before the nightmares got too bad. But on that first night, when he entered John's room, uninvited, unannounced, in the middle of a violent memory of guns and shouts and pain… Sherlock had stared down the barrel of the gun into painfully fear-filled eyes, and felt inadequate to deal with the situation. 

John had apologized, his voice tight and near hysterical. Sherlock had waved him off and asked him for his phone to send a text. 

John had let out a sob-like laugh and gave it to him. After making sure that John had put the gun away, safety on, he left him to his demons.

Sherlock had felt inadequate to deal with the situation, but hell would freeze over before he gave up. 

 

 

**00000000000**

 

In the end, the solution was something so obvious, so _stupidly_ obvious that Sherlock felt like throwing himself off a roof for not having seen it sooner.   

They'd just come back from solving a case. It had been brilliant, brilliant! Sure shots were fired, the murderer had taken a small fall down twenty floors, but they had gotten to the family he'd planned on killing before that and all thanks to a stupid mistake on the murderer's part. It was brilliant because only Sherlock had made the connection. 

John threw himself on his seat, exhausted after almost three sleepless night's trying to find the missing family. The adrenaline that had allowed him to run _up_ the twenty floors only for the murderer to jump out the window had long gone. He wanted to sleep and sleep he would. He just prayed that he didn't have another nightmare.   

Sherlock had been too high-strung to do anything but pace, grinning and retelling how he had made the connection to the killer and the place he was hiding in. In the middle of his talk he picked up his violin and started playing, mind filled with too much information and stimuli to be properly still. Playing, _composing,_ helped him bleed off the excessive mind-work. He didn't know how long he had been playing. An hour, twenty minutes, five… but when he turned to see what John thought of his new melody, he was met with the sight of doctor John Watson peacefully… asleep. 

It made Sherlock pause. He had never seen John this calm. There were no worry lines on his face at the moment. No pinched eyes or lips forming a frown. He stared for what might have been a few minutes, until he was broken out of his observations by John shifting. He turned his head, face once again alive with unhappy lines. 

An arm jerked and a low groan escaped him. 

With a calculating look, Sherlock touched the bow of his violin to the strings, starting a slow melody. 

The effect was instantaneous. 

John _settled_. 

He stopped playing, a few minutes later John making unhappy noises again, prompting Sherlock to play. 

Instant peace. 

Of course. 

How obvious. 

John's past was filled with screams and loud sounds attributed to violence, yet here was a sound born from pure _emotion_. Music was the key to John's nightmares. 

Music therapy. Cheap, easy to find, without an annoying person telling you stupid things and getting things wrong and intruding into your life. 

Here were only sounds.

Sounds that could wash away the drums of war. 

Sounds that could sooth even the most injured man. 

Sounds meant to bring soul deep comfort. 

Sherlock played. 


End file.
